It starts 'Does anyone knows where I can buy Fresh Young Coconuts in Sheffield?' and goes on to show pictures of these delicious fruits. And now, shazaam!, here's a possible answer to that question.

One of the bright alumni of Sheffield Hallam university (motto: Sharpens your thinking) has designed a 'coconut growing facility' for London Road in the city, and what's more, won a major European academic prize for it.

I'd better say straight away that it hasn't been built and probably won't be, at least not in the magnificent form which Jacob Szikora presents in his portfolio study The Concrete Orchard. This was part of his final work at Hallam where he graduated last year in architecture and environmental design.

This encourages bright ideas in sustainability in architecture and urban design, and he has just been handed it at the Casa dell'Architettura in Rome. The trigger for his work was the cost and environmental impact of trundling food all over the world, which prompted the question: can't we grow pretty much anything here.

Coconuts were chosen as an 'extreme' example, in much the same way as pineapples were targeted in the 17th century (check out the pinecones on the obelisks on Lambeth Bridge, which are said to honour local resident John Tradescant's growing of the first pineapple in the UK at the beautiful Thameside manor house of Dorney Court). Bananas ditto; I've seen them growing in Iceland, although when the Duke of Somerset went to enormous expense to grow them at Petworth, he sampled the first one, threw down his spoon and growled: "It tastes like any other damned banana." A guest had provoked the expensive experiment by telling the duke that bananas were only really worth eating when fresh.

Anyway...Szikora's 'coconut facility' sets out to prove that coconuts would grow in London Road, given a lovely pleasure dome which he has designed; and although they might taste like any others, they would provide coir fibre and young fruit, as per the Sheffield Community Forum post, without the cost and carbon footprint of importing.

The judges described the idea as 'holistic, thoroughly-researched and ambitious' and Szikora, who is from Daventry in Northaptonshire, says that he's delighted:

Due to the demand for coir products around the world, the coconut is one of the many imported foods that are significant contributors of greenhouse gases. My project, using the extreme case of the coconut as an example, explored how more products could be grown in Sheffield and other urban contexts, in order to reduce the amount of emissions wasted on transporting them from elsewhere.

His lecturer Gabriel Tang who nominated the project is equally proud of the feather in Hallam's cap. All we need now is for the city's magnificent Winter Garden to take the idea on; and this time next year, the Guardian Northerner can show you a Sheffield-grown nut and maybe South Yorkshire coir.

Meanwhile the project is on show at Hallam's Adsetts Learning Centre and will be part of the university's Creative Spark exhibition between 2 June and 23 June.